Hemmed in by a financial aid system that privileges private lenders, forced to shoulder the burden of state cuts to higher education, the majority of US college students now expect to be saddled with thousands of dollars in debt by the time they finish their studies. They know that student debt is the price of admission to the job market, their best shot at attaining a modicum of economic security.
The explosion of student debt has triggered calls from the Left to make American public universities truly public and shift the burden back onto state coffers rather than students’ bank accounts.
The Right, meanwhile, has offered its own plans. Arguably the most ambitious is that of Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and now president of Purdue University.
“This no-debt, low risk option,” Daniels said of his plan last year, “is another way we can help keep our land-grant school within financial reach of all qualified students.” Daniels’s program, at the time called “Bet on a Boiler” — an allusion to the school’s athletic nickname, the Boilermakers — allows private companies to directly fund students’ education. In return for the private investor money, students pledge to surrender a portion of their future wages for a certain amount of time.